1) Th Vwls r _W_L
This game will start out as any generic choose-your-own adventure story but after the player makes their first choice the vowels will start disappearing. At this point the player has the choice to continue with the story or to look for the vowels. If the player chooses to continue with the story, gradually the other letters start to leave the story to look for their friends. Eventually the story will get so unreadable that it forces the player to finally look for the vowels, if the haven’t chosen to already. At this point, the choose-you-own-adventure becomes about figuring out where to find each of the vowels by learning the characteristics of each vowel.
I’m unsure currently of how this will end but I am more interesting in the puzzle aspect of the game than the ending itself so it may be somewhat anticlimactic. Also, I like the idea of the narrative being self-aware, i.e. knowing that it is missing the ability to provide the reader with the necessary information to continue the generic CYOA (i.e. legible words to describe what’s going on) and is forced to make it known that it is self-aware.
2) Lightbulb
For this idea, I am interesting in generating narrative from very simple actions. The player controls a lightbulb in a busy room in a house (living room, den, etc.) and has only two options at each choice point: turn on or turn off. The interesting part of this story will be observing as the lightbulb how such a simple action pushes the storyline forward (or backward0 in different ways. I think that I may want to add a third option that the lightbulb can choose like ‘dim’ to make the storyline more dynamic but am unsure at this point.
I know I want to do graphics for this idea but am still deciding what specifically. I like a few ideas which could be used independently or in combination: 1) using basic icons instead of words to indicate the choices (i.e. a lit up bulb), 2) drawing newly introduced characters from the vantage point of the lightbulb, and therefore warped in the way things would look as if looking through a fishbowl, 3) drawing some entire scenes through the vantage point of the lightbulb. Right now I think I’m leaning towards a combination of 1 and 2.
I also imagine that this one will have a lot of hypertext embedded in the narrative itself: since the entire story takes place in one room and the player is controlling a static object in the room, the player should have plenty of time to observe and explore as the narrative goes on.
